Out There

A fish has certain advantages in water that even Phelps, the preeminent water-based athlete of our age, can only aspire to simulate.

Fish don’t need to break the water’s surface to breathe.

Phelps — owner of a dozen world and American swimming records; winner of six gold and two bronze medals in Athens in 2004; odds-on favorite to accumulate more such jewelry this month in Beijing — must, at some point, come up for air.

Or so you would think. But as you stare at the eerily still surface of the new pool at the Qwest Center in Omaha, into which Phelps has just lunged, it is possible to imagine, momentarily, that the figure undulating like a mass of kelp in the shallows of Lane 5 might just prefer to stay put, indefinitely, there in his element. I was watching a video from June 29, cueing the finals of the 400-meter individual medley at the United States Olympic Team Trials again and again with the hope of determining, somehow, the precise factors that enable Phelps to thrive, as few ever have, in an environment so unaccommodating to humans. It’s not a simple task. Of all Olympic sports, competitive swimming is perhaps the most resistant to casual analysis. When the contestants are not entirely submerged, they are typically face-down; the strokes they carve through the water tend to look the same, and much of what they do is in any case concealed by the splash of their effort. Unless you have an intimate knowledge of the athletes, there are few physical characteristics to distinguish one form in the water from another, an effect compounded by body shaving and the uniform of caps, goggles and bodysuits. (The new, much-publicized Speedo LZR bodysuit that Phelps wears, for instance, is a peculiar cross between a piece of lingerie and a tourniquet; fabricated by ultrasonic welding rather than by stitching, it molds the swimmer’s trunk into a drag-reducing form, can take 20 minutes to don and is proving to be a great improvement, speedwise, on old fashioned, no-tech skin.) The swimmer, pursuing his obscured course, is not one of us. Any attempt to fathom Phelps’s liquid mastery must, I thought, free itself from landlubberly prejudices and grapple with Phelps’s uncanny fish-ness.

The 400 I.M., which consists of two pool lengths of each of the four major strokes, is Phelps’s signature event. It requires strength, endurance, immaculate technique and versatility and is a supreme gauge of all-around swimming excellence. Phelps, who entered the trials one day shy of his 23rd birthday, has owned the event for the past six years, never losing in an international competition, setting the world record in 2002 and then resetting it another six times since then. Shockingly, in that June morning’s preliminary heats he finished second to Ryan Lochte, the only serious rival to his dominance in the pool; the result allowed observers to speculate about whether Phelps might actually be vulnerable.

If that were the case, Phelps’s demeanor gave nothing away. I watched as he stepped onto the blocks, inexpressive as a commuter waiting for a train, swung his arms across his chest three times, then leaned forward and stared into the pool. An instant later, he and his competitors were gone, streaking several feet beneath the surface of the water, arms stretched tight against their heads, their locomotion powered by a full-body flutter that finished with the two-legged slap of the so-called dolphin kick. The kick requires an enormous output of energy — imagine a potato-sack race through quicksand — but Phelps appeared to be in no rush to come up for air.

He remained underwater for the full 15 meters that swimmers are permitted from a start or a turn. When he emerged, ahead of the field, rising into the lunging motion of the butterfly stroke, his face looked a bit too relaxed for someone who had been exerting himself in an atmosphere that is 800 times denser than the one the rest of us move through. He seemed positively peaceful. His strokes were long and smooth, he kept close to the water to breathe — a sign of exquisite control and efficiency — and he seemed oblivious to Lochte’s presence, one lane over, level with his thighs, within striking distance. Phelps’s overall superiority may qualify him as a generalist in the pool, but he is also among the world’s best in several individual disciplines, including butterfly, and he could easily have pulled far ahead of the other swimmers. He didn’t. After 50 desultory meters in the lead, he was six-tenths of a second off his world-record pace, and even as he kept a small margin over Lochte, he continued to look as if he were warming up. Phelps is known to be an extraordinarily disciplined tactician. He opens races at a sustainable pace, and his strokes remain uniform, almost mechanically so, from beginning to end. There is nothing spontaneous, unruly or desperate about the figure he cuts in the pool. When other swimmers, battling fatigue, begin to lapse technically, Phelps looks as if he is swimming downhill.

The second 100 meters were backstroke. Phelps’s form remained consistent and exact: hips and legs close to the surface, arms moving through the water with the sureness and steadiness of a pair of scissor blades. It was as if his shoulders had no problem letting his arms whirl through 360 degrees. He appeared to be at leisure, though he couldn’t have been, any more than a miler could be said to be jogging when halfway through his race. At 150 meters, Phelps was suddenly ahead of world-record pace. Several of the swimmers began to fall back, and for a moment it seemed that Lochte might fade, too, leaving Phelps to race only himself. Lochte rallied, though, and once more pulled alongside Phelps. He was less than a second back at the 200-meter mark.

This meant trouble for Phelps. The next leg of the race was breaststroke, Phelps’s version of a weakness — during the preliminaries, Lochte’s time for the breaststroke portion of the race was more than three seconds faster than that of Phelps. For the first time, Phelps did not seem at ease. He and Lochte bobbed beside each other, like a pair of horses on a muddy track, neither able to break away from the other. At the turn, Phelps’s lead was down to a tenth of a second. Rising out of the water, his face was tense and his mouth hung open. By the time the breaststroke laps were over, his lead over Lochte had dwindled to two-hundredths of a second. Now he was fighting. The final leg of the race was freestyle. The swimmers matched each other stroke for stroke. Whatever his level of exhaustion, Phelps maintained his form. His body position stayed constant in the water throughout the stroke, even when he turned his head for breath. As he approached the final turn, Phelps drew his legs in, somersaulted, thrust himself off the wall and headed underwater. It was at this point that something unusual happened. Turning, Phelps seemed to glance toward Lochte, take stock of his position and plow deeper into the pool. As Lochte rose to the surface, Phelps was still underwater, surging with each dolphin kick. When Phelps finally broke through, he had left Lochte behind. Phelps is renowned for finishing his races in overpowering fashion, and often he will hold back from taking a decisive lead until his last lap. His competitors invariably find that there is no such thing as a comfortable margin over Phelps, and on this occasion he made it seem as if he had been toying with Lochte. With the end of the race in sight, he kept his head down. When he looked up, he had set a new world record. Lochte was eight-tenths of a second back; the third-place swimmer finished nearly eight seconds later.

“People aren’t made to move like that,” says Russell Mark, the biomechanics manager for USA Swimming, the sport’s national governing body. Mark has a background in jet-engine design and a connoisseur’s eye for aquatic technique, but he assures me that the language of fluid dynamics barely describes the specific magic of a swimmer like Phelps. Human beings, Mark says, are simply not designed to balance themselves horizontally in a moving, unstable medium in which they have only intermittent access to oxygen. How, then, did Phelps manage so persuasively to make the unnatural seem natural? “The biomechanics of swimming is more theory than science,” Mark admits. “When water is surrounding someone, it’s really hard to measure what’s going on.” The pool, it turns out, is a place of vast ambiguity. The seemingly straightforward question of what transpires when Phelps swims gets very complicated very quickly and speaks to the mysterious nature of athletic achievement at its peak. According to Mark, a great debate has divided swim theorists for decades, centering on whether propulsion is generated, airplanelike, by the forces of lift, which operate in a direction perpendicular to the motion of the object (see: Bernoulli), or by a more direct relationship between action and reaction (recall: Newton). The practical implications of one’s position on the debate have to do with the design of a swimmer’s strokes. A Bernoullian might favor S-shaped strokes, pulling in and pulling out, to launch the body through the water. A Newtonian relies on a less-oblique application of strength: push the water toward your feet — as much water as you can, as efficiently as possible, avoiding the wasted effort involved in pushing water toward the bottom of the pool or away from your body (which is not as easy as it sounds) — and you will surge in the opposite direction. Phelps is a Newtonian of a high order. His hands and arms slice through the pool in such a way that they grab lots of water, as if he were wielding a pair of buckets, and shove it backward. It might be a stretch to describe the Newtonian swimmer as conventionally “beautiful” in the water, unless you were willing to concede the beauty of a machine, or of a weapon.

Photo

BUILDING THE PERFECT MACHINE: Bob Bowman has made Phelps his consuming project. Credit
Finlay MacKay

Phelps’s most fundamental victory is not over Lochte or other swimmers, but the one he achieves over an inhospitable element. Fish don’t have to work at it. They don’t have arms and legs. Their backbones extend the entire length of their bodies. They have gills. “Humans have to adapt our bodies to the swimming environment,” Mark says. “The difference between normal people and Olympians is that the Olympians have made the adaptation to water really, really, really well.” Indeed, Phelps’s new world-record time in Omaha, 4:05.25, was nearly six seconds faster than his world-record time set in 2002 — and more than 100 seconds, or roughly 30 percent, faster than the first records set in the event some 55 years ago. Human perfectability is an evolving concept.

02 AT ELEVATION:

The United States Olympic Training Center occupies a former military installation not far from the center of Colorado Springs,

some 6,000 feet above sea level. With its eclectic assortment of blocky, glassy and pointy buildings, housing such things as a velodrome and an indoor shooting range, it looks like a community college for the very buff. When I caught my first glimpse of Michael Phelps, ambling down a corridor in a gray hooded sweatshirt and rumpled track pants, shaggy hair over his brow and with a beard in some indeterminate state of grooming, it was easy to mistake him for any ordinary sleep-deprived collegian.

A half-hour later, he was standing, swimsuited, on the deck of the Training Center’s 810,000-gallon pool, and he seemed an altogether different class of physical specimen. It wasn’t simply the utter lack of body fat, the elegantly articulated muscles, the blend of leanness and strength — features he shares with any number of top athletes. It was, rather, the double-take-inducing peculiarity of his proportions, which mimic the effect of a distorting lens. Predictably enough, his shoulders and chest were broad, his waist slender. But his arms, ending in mitt-size hands, seemed to dangle to his knees, and, most disconcertingly, his frame appeared to incorporate the upper and lower bodies of two different people: his legs would have suited a man 5-foot-10, perhaps even shorter; his torso went on and on, and his height stretched to 6-foot-4. “I’ve never seen another swimmer built like Michael,” says Bob Bowman, who has coached Phelps continuously since 1997. “You knew it as soon as you saw the body. At 11, he had everything he has now — only smaller.” In Phelps’s case, anthropometry — his dimensions, his proportions — was, at least in part, destiny. Bowman could size him up at a glance and know that he was born to be adapted to the water. “He had the boat,” Bowman says. Phelps’s upper body rode high and fast on the water, and his relatively short legs — whose kicking was greatly assisted by his prominent “flippers,” which would grow to size 14 — didn’t drag him down in back. Since most of a swimmer’s force is generated from the body’s core, Phelps’s disproportionately long torso was a gift. So, too, was his enormous “wingspan,” which would reach 6-foot-7 at maturity and which could shunt great volumes of water behind him, allowing him to save energy by using fewer strokes than other swimmers to cover the same distance. Da Vinci might have faulted Phelps’s form for its deviation from classical proportions; but for Bowman’s purposes, Phelps was made to order.

Phelps had other attributes, too, that would help him develop into the rare amphibious creature he would become. His joints were unusually flexible. Lying on his back, he could stretch his legs and point his toes far enough so that they would brush the ground. His shoulders had a similarly outsize range of motion, giving him the potential for great power and fluidity in his strokes. Even his spine proved particularly amenable to balancing in, and slithering through, water. “Michael,” Bowman says, “had everything.”

Bowman, who is 43, wears wire-rimmed glasses over squinting eyes, carries a touch of softness around the midsection and has the mild features of a social worker. But he is a notorious taskmaster. He has been known to scream, scold, glare, cajole and otherwise manipulate his swimmers to bend them to his will. Phelps has been Bowman’s consuming project ever since he determined, in his words, “to build the perfect machine.” Bowman studied music in college and likes to speak of himself in terms of an old-school, authoritarian orchestra conductor, refining the raw gifts of his players. (He has also developed an interest, more recently, in raising thoroughbreds; coaching Phelps, he has remarked, is like training Secretariat.) He started the preteen Phelps on six-days-a-week practice regimens, often making him swim more than once a day, to work systematically on his mechanics, his endurance and his strength. He recognized Phelps’s predisposition to develop gargantuan aerobic capacity and exploited it, ultimately pushing him to swim at least 50 miles each week. He knew that prepubescent children can, through training, increase the size of their hearts and lungs in ways that are no longer possible later on. “The larger the heart and lungs,” he has noted, “the bigger the aerobic engine.” Beginning when Phelps was 12, he worked the swimmer seven days a week, guided by the assumption that competitors who rested on Sundays were at least one-seventh less conditioned. “Michael has a pretty easy life,” he would joke, “if you don’t count the five hours a day of torture I put him through.”

When I visited Colorado Springs in mid-May, Bowman was wrapping up a three-week high-altitude training stint with Club Wolverine, the elite Ann Arbor, Mich., swimming organization at which he bears the title High Performance Coach and whose members include Phelps. (From 2004 until his resignation earlier this year, Bowman was also the head coach of the University of Michigan’s swim team; Phelps followed Bowman to Ann Arbor from his native Baltimore.) Training in thin air is a proven and perfectly legal means of boosting an athlete’s red-blood-cell count, which increases the oxygen delivered to muscles. The trip also afforded Bowman, who prefers to start his day at around 4 a.m., the opportunity to lead his crew through a final pre-Olympic-trials boot camp. The schedule for the Colorado sojourn featured three sessions in the pool per day and an additional hour of “dry land” activities like weight training or Pilates, for a total of 70 workouts in three weeks. Although Bowman was dedicated to mixing up the training regimen to keep his swimmers from getting comfortable, he followed certain patterns: the early session featured 90 minutes of low-key, continuous aerobic exertion — three or four miles of wake-up laps. Midday practice was an intense two-hour affair, putting the swimmers through their paces at top speeds or at the very threshold of their endurance; dry-land work followed for an hour. Later in the afternoon, the day’s final workout focused on muscle power rather than lung power, featuring drills with parachutes, fins, paddles, kick boards, floats, limb-disabling bands, snorkels and other accouterments designed to isolate particular skills. Bowman could be sure that his swimmers had little time or energy left at the end of the day for anything but eating, sleeping and occasionally slumping in front of the television. Phelps, who is said to require 8,000 to 10,000 calories a day to sustain his efforts, spent much of his free time napping or in pursuit, as he puts it, of “whatever I want to eat, whenever I want it, however much I want.”

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The practice I attended was what Bowman termed a farewell swim: the two dozen team members would be packing their bags afterward and heading to Santa Clara, Calif., before dawn the next morning for a meet. Consequently, Bowman had designed a feel-good wind-down session, featuring lap after lap at what he called a low-intensity “white pace,” at which swimmers maintain heart rates of around 130 beats per minute. (Trained swimmers have heart rates that are much lower both at rest and at maximum exertion than those of ordinary fit people.) The swimmers seemed to drift by in slow motion, plying their backstroke with languid windmill motions, then moving on to freestyle, bending their elbows and dropping their forearms through the water’s surface, hatchet-style, then rising and falling from the pool with their breaststroke and butterfly. Music played over a loudspeaker, but the sound bounced off the water and the walls so haphazardly that it registered as an indistinct blare. Phelps blended into the mix with the others — he was surrounded by other prospective Olympians, including Erik Vendt, Peter Vanderkaay and Allison Schmitt — and wore the kind of detached expression befitting someone who had done much the same thing most of the days of his life. “You’ve got to understand how monotonous and boring our training is,” Bowman told me. “And hard.” On several occasions, I watched as Phelps tried to irk Bowman — as Bowman predicted he would — by tugging on the lane divider during kicking exercises. “Michael knows it’s one of the things I absolutely hate most,” Bowman said. “When he first started doing it, I went nuts, and it wasted our time. It’s just a way he has of asserting his independence from me — a stupid way. I’ve decided that for now I’m going to pick my battles and ignore it.”

After 40 minutes, Bowman had his swimmers increase their intensity to a “pink pace,” their heart rates rising to around 150 beats per minute. The swimmers grew more serious, and it was clear that many were focused on racing their teammates in adjacent lanes. Phelps seemed indifferent to the contest and allowed others to beat him to the wall. It wasn’t until Bowman called for a “red pace” — around 165 beats per minute — that Phelps, swimming freestyle, poured on his power and broke away from surrounding swimmers by several lengths. Afterward, he climbed out of the pool, grabbed his phone and, I surmised, began sending text messages. He looked no more winded than if he had been skimming the pool’s surface on an inflatable raft.

The crux of Phelps’s superiority — the quality that allows him to maintain the power and efficiency of his strokes when other swimmers begin to falter and that allows him to overpower competitors in the final lap of a race — is his endurance. Years of Bowman’s drills have developed and refined Phelps’s capacity to endure, but from the outset Phelps brought to the pool physiological attributes that place him at the limit for his species. Under aerobic strain, Phelps produces far less lactic acid than other athletes. There is considerable controversy over whether lactic acid itself is detrimental to athletic performace, but it is known that elevated levels of lactic acid are accompanied by a suite of other metabolic products — hydrogen ions, inorganic phosphates — that interfere with muscle contraction and are the stuff of ruinous fatigue. Phelps and other swimmers are continually tested to measure their blood lactate levels (the lower they are, the better a body’s state of aerobic conditioning) and to determine the rate at which they clear lactate from their systems, which indicates their ability to recover. Bowman, who is unapologetically secretive, won’t reveal Phelps’s results, but some data have leaked out over the years, and they have become the stuff of swimming lore. After he set a world record in the 100-meter butterfly in 2003, Phelps’s blood lactate level was an absurdly low 5.6 millimoles per liter of blood, one-half to one-third that of other elite swimmers. At competitions during which Phelps has raced multiple events in quick succession, he has been known to clear lactate from his blood while racing. He also has the ability to tolerate high levels of blood lactate — to swim at full strength and speed while carrying a load of lactate that would bring other athletes to a relative crawl. It’s part of Phelps’s recipe for flourishing beyond all reasonable expectations in water. Genadijus Sokolovas, an intense former pentathlete from Lithuania who is the sports-science director for USA Swimming, explained to me how important this is: “I recently calculated how much Michael is going to swim in Beijing. We don’t know his final schedule yet, but if it’s similar to Athens, the total time he’ll spend in the water — preliminaries, semifinals, finals, warm-ups, cool-downs — will be the equivalent of running eight or nine marathons over the course of the Olympic Games.”

Photo

THE SWIMMER AT HOME: Famously clumsy on land, Phelps has abundant mental and physical gifts for moving through water. Credit
Finlay MacKay

The next morning, I returned to the pool, where I found Sokolovas standing on the deck in front of a bank of electronic equipment, administering what he called a “swim-power test” to a specialist in the butterfly from Indiana University. The swimmer wore a belt around his waist from which a fishing line transmitted measurements of velocity and force 60 times each second; at the same time, a camera mounted on a track on the pool wall followed him down the lane and another camera filmed him from below. The apparatus, which Sokolovas developed, analyzes a swimmer’s effectiveness according to 25 to 30 different parameters and gives coaches a way to quantify the costs of a swimmer’s mechanical flaws. “Before this,” Sokolovas said, “we were just guessing — high elbow position is better than low elbow position, or pulling in the middle is better than pulling from the side. Now we can test any hypothesis.” (Bowman does not allow Sokolovas to share specific results of any testing he has performed on Phelps.) Sokolovas is a sporting objectivist and regards Phelps and other members of the mystical vanguard of athletes with an unsentimental gaze. “Working on his technique with Coach Bowman for so many years,” Sokolovas said, “definitely helped Phelps develop a very efficient way to generate his velocity curve on these graphs, and years of high-volume swimming really developed his aerobic conditioning. But,” he continued, “I’m pretty sure we have many more Michael Phelpses in this country.” Sokolovas noted, with some frustration, that the United States lacks the kind of organized system of talent identification that other countries use to start developing athletes in early childhood. “There are plenty of methods we can use to evaluate a child,” he said. “We can look at their biological parents and project their anthropometric parameters; we can evaluate their aerobic ability by testing their maximum oxygen output or measuring their aortas. We can test how fast they adapt to long-term training. It’s easy to evaluate, but instead we rely on the athlete coming to us, the way Michael Phelps came to Bob Bowman.”

In that case, I asked, how likely are we ever to see the likes of Phelps again? Sokolovas brushed aside my question. “I’m pretty sure his records will be broken in 5 to 10 years. The swimmers who are going to do this are already in the system.” Doesn’t human potential eventually hit a wall? “No,” he replied. “There is no point at which athletes can’t continue to improve. You can always do higher-intensity training, or maybe higher volumes. A swimmer can do more training on land; or more strength training in water, like swimming against resistances. You can improve your technique. You can improve your nutrition. Basically, I don’t see any limits in swim performance. We’ll never build the perfect swimmer. The records will go up and up.”

Bowman had a slightly different take on the matter. “Do you reach a point where you can’t go any faster? Probably. But,” he added, “I don’t think Michael is there yet.”

03 ON LAND:

For years, Phelps has been trailed by the notion that his superiority in water is offset by his ordinariness on land.

He is, in part, the author of this fish story, having offered himself to the media, repeatedly, as “the klutziest person on earth.” It’s as though the anomaly of his dominance in the pool — the fact that no one can remember the last time he failed to win races in his primary events, the 200- and 400-meter individual medleys; the fact that his willing submission to the long-term, single-minded tedium and hardship of training seems to belong to another era (Cold War) and another culture (Eastern Bloc) — begged to be explained by some deficiency that made him, well, more like the rest of us. Bowman long ago stopped requiring Phelps to run, we are told, because Phelps tripped and fell with alarming frequency. (The flexibility in Phelps’s ankles, which enhances his training in the pool, results in some loss of stability on land.) His ungainliness is such, the story goes, that he nearly cost himself the Olympics last October when he tumbled getting out of a car and broke a bone in his wrist. (It was dark, it was icy, it was Michigan; Phelps returned to the pool the day after undergoing surgery.) It’s true that before Athens, Phelps was nearly alone among top swimmers in having eschewed weight training, but it turns out that Bowman, far-sighted and ever in touch with his charge’s capacities, was waiting for Phelps’s body to mature before adding bulk to it. (Since then, Phelps has added 15 pounds of muscle and not an ounce of fat.) Bowman acknowledged that as a child Phelps tried soccer, lacrosse and baseball too and that he was far and away the best athlete on those playing fields before giving himself over to his true calling, after which all other athletic endeavors ceased.

Indeed, while it is tempting to regard Phelps’s thoroughgoing immersion in chlorinated waters as inevitable — akin to Tiger Woods picking up a golf club or Roger Federer a racquet — his route to success in the pool was, Bowman says, “the confluence of a lot of happy things.” Out on the accidental frontiers of human possibility, the best athletes are produced by a perfect storm of circumstance: rare natural talents; state-of-the-art training; and a deep wash in the murk of psychology, where, perhaps most mysterious of all, ferocious ambition, discipline and capacity for self-sacrifice reside.

The genetic boons of Phelps’s physique and physiology were preconditions to his success, to be sure, but he also was fortunate to come from a family that was intimate with pool culture and understood the brutal routines of the committed swimmer. (Two older sisters, including one who was a likely Olympian before injuring her back, preceded him through the ranks of the prestigious North Baltimore Aquatic Club, where Bowman was a coach.) Phelps had abundant native gifts, but Bowman also saw in him an uncommon knack for responding to the kinds of pressure that make most children miserable, coupled with an absolute distaste for losing and a full-blown, true-to-life embodiment of swimming’s flakiest and most vaunted concept: a feel for the water. Phelps had a heightened and detailed awareness of his body in water — how it moved, how it balanced, what helped him go fast and what hindered the effort. He didn’t fight the water. He was at home in it.

By the time Phelps was 11, the pool was his world, and it was one that offered more calm and certainty than he found elsewhere. (His parents divorced when Phelps was 9; at school, Phelps received a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.) He was already used to winning easy praise in the pool; Bowman made him work for it, rebuilding what he regarded as sloppy technique and offering Phelps scathing criticism even when he won races by 20 meters. “A coach has to know what he’s trying to accomplish in practice,” Bowman told me, “but once those things are in place, it’s my job to work on the swimmer’s head. I can look in Michael’s eyes in the morning and tell you how he’s going to swim. I can look at the way he’s moving and tell you his physical and mental state.” Bowman managed to turn Phelps into what the swimmer called “the robot I was at 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.”

Leading up to Athens, Bowman’s control over his prodigy was nearly total. He knew when Phelps slept and when he ate; he persuaded Phelps to put his social life on hold in order to concentrate on the Games. After Athens, Bowman loosened the reins somewhat — seven-days-a-week practices became more the exception than the rule — but Phelps remains something of a paradox: a person who has traveled the world but experienced little of it, a grown man whose maturation, even by Bowman’s account, has been put on hold. He has yet to venture far from the water, the habitat he knows best.

I met Phelps, out of his element, in a lounge at the United States Olympic Training Center, following swim practice. He was not an eager conversationalist. He fidgeted, resisted eye contact and responded to my questions briefly and with little enthusiasm. After 20 minutes, there was a pronounced silence between us. I’d like to think I understood the discomfort of the meeting. Yes, he was probably tired after practice; no doubt he was run down by endless obligations to the media. Above all, though, it seemed that Phelps was signaling the basic difference between his world and mine, between swimming and talking about it. In his medium, language is secondary; self-reflection can cost hundredths or tenths of a second. “My job is to be in the water and swim,” he told me. “That’s about it.” I asked him what went through his mind during a race. “Nothing. I just get in the water and race.” Phelps was telling it like it was, without any land-based need for elaboration, analysis or metaphor. “I’ve spent a lot of time around the water,” he said. “Without it, I don’t know what I’d be doing with myself.”

I was tempted to tell Phelps what Pindar, the Greek poet, wrote long ago in an ode composed, aptly enough, for an ancient Olympiad: “Water is best.” Phelps, I thought, might share the sentiment. But he didn’t need to hear it from me. He knows the water in ways few others could. “I guess the water just fits me,” he offered, “and fits what I love.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page MM46 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Out There. Today's Paper|Subscribe